Watch, not do

Set in a hedonistic future owing much to the dystopian world of Aldous Huxley‘s Brave New World (1932), the play presents us with a society stratified between the brightener-popping ruling class ‘High Drives’ of Output Area 27 and a mass of ‘Low Drives’ kept passive on a diet of broadcast pornography. Kneale’s script calls it a ‘McLuhanised world’ (McLuhan‘s The Medium is the Massage, an immediate bestseller, was published a year earlier) in which television is used to ”massage” the sensorium, the seat of sensation, into passivity.

According to Kneale, his inspiration for the play came from two theatrical productions rather than television: the hippie musical Hair, which featured full frontal nudity, and Kenneth Tynan‘s bawdy theatrical review Oh! Calcutta!, to which Tynan had invited Kneale. He tied these public displays of permissiveness to popular ’60s concerns with overpopulation and civil unrest:

”The Year of the Sex Olympics was a double comment. First of all it was a comment on television and the idea of a passive audience. At that time, the population was a very hot topic and it was also the time when Hair was on and people were saying ”lets put porn on stage”. So I put these ideas together and took them to their logical conclusion, using porn as a socially beneficial element that turns people into the ultimate passive audience by hooking them on a substitute for sex rather than the real thing and so keeping the population down.”

–— Nigel Kneale, Interview with Julian Petley & Kim Newman

Nat Mender (Alastair Gillies, a great improvement on Tony Vogel in the TV version) is a television producer on the Sportsex channel, currently broadcasting The Sex Olympics. Nat is, in the words of Kneale’s script, ‘a decahedral peg in a nonahedral hole’; his fellow programmer, the ambitious Lasar Opie (Benjamin Patterson), fits in perfectly. The third member of their team is the shallow presenter Misch (Louise Hamer) with whom Nat is having a loveless sexual relationship. Misch speaks of the viewing audience with contempt but Hamer plays Misch’s insecurity well: her hatred springs from the knowledge that her fame and beauty are transitory.

Nat also has a daughter, Ketten (Michelle Ashton) with Deanie Webb (Claire Dean), both of whom who he clearly cares for, though he is unable to express this love in terms that sound anything other than selfish (Gillies struggles to articulate his feelings despite his impoverished language are among this production’s highlights). Deanie shows more compassion for her daughter – though she describes herself as ‘the mother’ not ‘her mother’. When Nat and Deanie visit their daughter at the Child Environment Centre where children are raised without their parents and it appears she has been diagnosed as Low-Drive Nat is angry:

NAT: It all goes on my record! And your record too! What about that!For an instant Deanie hardly grasps his meaning. Then she is on her feet and at his shoulder, whispering fiercely:DEANIE: Stop it! Think about her!

Coordinator Ugo Priest (Howard Whittock, stepping ably into the shoes of the great Leonard Rossiter) is old enough to remember the old times – or at least remember people who remember the old times – before Apathy Control. He retains an articulacy rare in this world but is a passionate advocate of apathy, expressed with the zealotry of the convert:

PRIEST: Yes. I am an old days man. The big break-through when they found the sheer power of watching. It took ’em a long time. Old days, they always said there were things you couldn’t show, things you mustn’t say. You ever hear the word ”pornography”? (Nat shakes his head). ”Censor”? (Nat shakes his head again) Ah. Meant a man that… Well, he’d have put a stop to all this. all of Sportsex, Artsex – the lot.NAT (baffled): Why?PRIEST: Stupidness…He takes another brightener. Nat wonders obscurely if he is being got at.NAT: Like… Like I stopped that kinky team in there?PRIEST (shaking his head): A censor stopped things being taken too far. We stop ’em from not going far enough. (He sucks at the brightener) But then this breakthrough. They found that if they screened everything… and screened it real kingstyle… then basically the audience would make do with that. In place of the real thing. Take all the experience at second hand and just sit watching, calmly and quietly.NAT: Watch, not do.PRIEST: Watch, not do – that’s when it started. Of course they wondered if it would work. well it’s what we’ve got out there now. And we know it does. the vicarious society..Nat, who has been sucking brighteners fast, stares.NAT: Vic -victorious?PRIEST: Vicarious. Means substitute. This-for-that.NAT: Oh, this-for-that.PRIEST: Sorry, Nat. Dropping into old-days words. With thinking about those times. (Kindly) There was such a word, ”victorious”. To do with war..NAT (more confidently): War was… a kind of tension.PRIEST: Right. And riots, and crises. Too many people in the world. I remember the old slogan: ”Fight fire with fire, sex with sex!” They dosed it – (he waves his hand round them) – with this. Doused everything in the end. No more tensions, nothing. Just cool.

The Live Life Show

Priest recognises that the audience is growing bored with sex and tries to introduce programming that will tap another bodily response – laughter. But his crass attempts at introducing comedy programming – custard pie fights and other slapstick – fail to raise a smile despite his insistence that this is what the audience wants like a demented cross between Gaius Sempronius Gracchus, Joseph Goebbels, and TISWAS‘ Chris Tarrant.

When aspiring artist Kin Hodder (Will Hutchby) accidentally dies on air during a protest provoking howls of laughter from the audience, Lasar Opie conceives of The Live Life Show, a live Reality TV show featuring a family on a remote Scottish island. Nat and Deanie volunteer, and take their daughter with them, perhaps hoping to create their own Walden, well away from the stresses and obligations of Output. (Since Co-ordinator Priest seams such an apt name for a preacher for the faith apathy it perhaps isn’t stretching it too far to read Nat as Natural and Mender as Healer.) For the first few minutes of this second half of the play we experience some sense of hope even if the conditions Nat and his family are to live under are harsh: they are a family at last – and that’s where stories end happily isn’t it?

Thereafter, the play becomes increasingly dark as the upwardly mobile Opie begins to manipulate their lives further for the entertainment of the audience. The family are not alone on the island: there’s the mysterious Grels (Phil Dennison at his creepiest) and his sullen partner Betty (Leni Murphy, in one of four roles in this production). Even Priest is shocked as events unfold.

There is some effective use vignetting to switch between the island and the Output crew in the second half of the play. The Salmon Room is a small intimate venue and the production makes as much use of the space as possible. The sets consist of little more than a console at which the Output crew direct their programmes and monitor audience response and there are few props: this is a production that rests on the actor’s commitment to the script and the audience’s imagination. The audience is much more implicated in the drama than the TV version, as sitting at home it is much easier to pretend the diegetic audience represent someone else: here we are complicit in the actions onstage. We don’t have recourse to feeling smugly superior to an imagined audience.

Reduced Language

Language reduction is a major theme of the play; the reduced language, Ad Speak, is a notable constructed language, owing something to the Newspeak of George Orwell‘s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) – the difference being that while Newspeak was deliberately designed by a ruling oligarchy to prevent Party members from thinking unauthorised thoughts – committing ‘thoughtcrime‘ – the language ofSex Olympicshas reduced itself naturally as words and concepts have become obsolete. Here, Nat struggles to articulate his thoughts about Will Hodder’s paintings:

NAT: Still not feel I got… the right words for it. They got to be somewhere. Where they go, Co-ordinator? Why they go, all those words?PRIEST: People didn’t need ’em. They got out of having the thoughts so the words went too.NAT: Thoughts… (Slowly, making a discovery) Those pictures were thoughts!PRIEST: Eh?NAT: That what they felt like. Old, old thoughts you had… Real jumbo thoughts you forgot you ever had ’em… until you saw!PRIEST: Bad thoughts.NAT: Why bad?PRIEST: If they upset people.NAT: Just the way they came out. You know, I can feel ’em now in my head. But I got no words for ’em.PRIEST: They hurt?NAT: Just the way they came out. You know, I can feel ’em now… in my head. I can think ’em. But I got no words for ’em.

There are no Thought Police in Kneale’s world as thoughts police themselves: the most chilling fact of Kneale’s dystopia is that it is one the populace have entered willingly. Yet Kneale is no linguistic determinist: Nat can feel his thoughts even if he cannot articulate them. He may be trapped in a prison-house of language but can see through the bars.

Adjectives and verbs are interchangeable in Ad-Speak (MISCH: They sick me too). The language is also slightly Russified like the Nadsat of Anthony Burgess‘ A Clockwork Orange (1962): Ad Speak largely omits definite and indefinitearticles (”the”, ”a”, ”an”), a characteristic of Russian Grammar. There are fewer tenses, there are few cupulas to link the subject of a sentence with predicates, and word order is more flexible than English. Certain slang terms also suggest a Slavic root (”bubbies’ from ”babushka”, for instance) and character names like Misch (derived from the man’s name Mikhail, but which has, like Nikita, been adopted as a woman’s name in the West) reinforce this impression. Kneale wasn’t suggesting that the UK had been invaded by the Soviet Union though, any more than Burgess was; more that nation states have lost all definition in a media saturated world. To use another ”McLuhanism” we are all part of the same ”Global Village”. (In the TV version the cast adopt a distinctly transatlantic accent). The cumulative effect is that Ad Speak sounds like it has been imperfectly translated from a language which has no native speakers. The cast, veterans of The Ballad of Halo Jones, are experienced enough with futuristic sociolects to make it sound natural.

Nigel Kneale… Prophet?

Most of the reviews have been along the lines of Nigel Kneale: Prophet but Science fiction isn’t prophecy and shouldn’t be judged as such – though there’s an almost irresistible temptation to discuss the play with reference to the ways in which it accurately anticipates some developments in television – in particular Reality TV shows like Survivor (1992 – Present) and Big Brother (1999- Present). Reality TV actually dates back as far as Candid Camera in 1948, and the Up Series had begun broadcasting with Seven Up! in 1964, so Kneale is deconstructing contemporary ’60s television here rather than predicting future developments. Correspondences between the play and contemporary reality are largely due to our ability to create signal from noise, and are a fine example of the Texas Sharpshooter fallacy.

The play is as interesting for what it ‘got wrong’ as what it ‘got right’. Science fiction isn’t about prophesy, and Kneale wasn’t ‘predicting’ the future, so when I use the phrase ‘got things wrong’ I’m not really suggesting Kneale was actually trying to predict the future – still less that his play should be judged accordingly; I would argue that science fiction attempts to do something different, and should be judged as an expression of the present rather than an experiment in futurology. One subtle and interesting way that The Year of the Sex Olympicsis ‘correct’ is the way it shows that ‘Reality’ TV is actually constructed, not simply broadcast: Opie manipulates the events on the island, and is selective in what he broadcasts – denying the audience information about what caused Ketten’s fall, for instance, in order to increase suspense.

What Kneale didn’t foresee was the combination of feminism and a conservative backlash which made nudity – largely synonymous with female nudity – less acceptable on UK TV. People talk about sex more on TV, there’s much more strong language, and homosexual themes are more openly represented, but this has largely been a pragmatic consequence of the campaign against AIDS that began in the Eighties rather than an a result of the ‘permissive society’ or a ‘loosening’ of morals. There’s some hardcore content in movies these days, of course, even in the UK, beginning with Lars von Trier‘s The Idiots (1998), and continuing with Catherine Breillat‘s Romance (1999), Baise-Moi (2000), Intimacy(2001), Vincent Gallo‘s The Brown Bunny (2003) and Michael Winterbottom‘s 9 Songs(2004), Shortbus (2006), Destricted (2006) and Trier’s Antichrist (2009) – but those are independent art house movies, often subtitled, consumed by a more middle-classes audience – the High-Drives of Kneale’s play – rather than the working-class Low-Drives. There’s also a quite a bit of simulated sex on subscription channels (Hung, 2009- Present, Game of Thrones, 2011- Present) but the audience figures for those are small compared with mainstream terrestrial television or subscription sports channels.

The consumption of pornography on the internet is still something looked upon as a dubious activity no matter how many people do it, and it is not regarded as socially acceptable as watching the latest Lars Von Trier movie. The so-called ‘adult channels‘ available in the UK are also heavily censored. The First Amendment guarantees the freedom to produce and distribute pornography in the USA but it remains a religious and conservative country; Janet Jackson‘s accidental ‘wardrobe malfunction‘ during Super Bowl XXXVIII provoked a level of public outrage not seen since 9/11 and led to an immediate crackdown on perceived ‘indecency’ in broadcasting. Explicit pornography has not become mainstream.

Nigel Kneale… Artist?

Kneale’s view of the audience as passive and sadistic is also too pessimistic. If anything, Kneale fails to appreciate how overlymoralistic the public are. When audiences heard that Celebrity Big Brother 2007contestant – and ultimately winner – Shilpa Shetty was the subject to racist comments by the other contestants, Jade Goody became the most hated woman in Great Britain since Myra Hindley: the controversy generated over 300 newspaper articles in Britain, 1,200 in English language newspapers around the globe, 3,900 foreign language news articles, and 22,000 blog postings on the internet. Jan Moir‘s comments following the the death of Boyzone singer Stephen Gately in 2009 earned her widespread vilification and the Stonewall Bigot of the Year Award (jointly with Father John Owen), and Jeremy Clarkeson‘s joke at the expense of BBC ‘impartiality’ lead to an equally strong reaction from the PCS. People don’t enjoy watching other people suffer unless they believe they have done something to deserve it – and the play gives the diegetic audience no reason to hate the protagonists. Suffering produces sympathy, not shadenfreude; the Ethiopian famine provoked Live Aid, not laughter.

Kneale was a perceptive critic of television as well as a great writer – but he was as vulnerable to moral panics as anyone else, and like many great writers TV writers (Paddy Cheyefsky, Dennis Potter, Aaron Sorkin) takes television at it’s self-flagellatingly low estimation of its own worth. Too much emphasis on ”Nigel Kneale: Prophet” has undervalued his true worth as ”Nigel Kneale: Artist”.

Kneale had an extraordinary imagination and a flair for conveying a fictional world through language alone that transcended his chosen medium. Until recently TV has been regarded as a disposable medium compared with literature or film; the BFI DVD release is out of print and expensive. Don’t miss this rare chance to see an excellent production one of Kneale’s finest works.

The Premier performance was a read-through by the cast, seated in front of a live audience and reading from the script, rather than the full theatrical performance, complete with props and costumes, that it will be when it returns on 21 July. This being the case, and bearing in mind that the star of this the premiere won’t be appearing in those performances, I’ll stick to reviewing the script for now – with some asides on Darrow.

Robots of Death is a free adaptation of Chris Boucher‘s 1977 Doctor Whostory of the ”The Robots of Death”. Originally featuring the Fourth Doctor (the inimitable Tom Baker) and Leela (Louise Jameson) our heroes have now been replaced by the psychopathic assassins Kaston Iago and his partner Elska Blayes (Tracey Russell, reprising her role from the audios). Iago and Bleyes are not there to help anyone, they are there to kill a target – and anyone else who happens to get in their way.

For the most part the story remains pretty much the same as on TV: aboard the Sandminer Storm Mine 4, a huge vehicle trawling through the debris thrown up by the raging sandstorms of an unnamed planet in search of precious minerals, someone, or something, is killing off the crew one by one. Most of the actual work is performed by three classes of robot, the mute D-Class ‘Dums’, the more sophisticated ‘Vocs’ and a supervising ‘Super-Voc’. The human crew are a quarrelsome bunch, seething with either class entitlement or class resentment but oblivious of the fact the foundations upon which their civilization is built are no more solid than the shifting sands of the desert. The story is essentially a science fiction whodunit: Agatha Christie‘s And Then There Were None (1939) done as science fiction – but this shift in genre is crucial as the themes explored are not simply those of a country house murder mystery performed in science fiction drag.

The major science fiction theme of the story is ‘robophobia’, an irrational – though in this case, perhaps not – fear of robots, which is also refered to as Grimwade’s Syndrome in the TV version – an in-joke at the expense of production assistant Peter Grimwade, who had complained about always having to work on stories featuring robots. (Grimwade was later to become a writer and director on the show.) Robophobia is a version of what robotics professor Masahiro Mori refered to as the ”Uncanny Valley effect”, or Bukimi no Tani Genshō, in an essay in 1970. According to the theory, the more human an automaton looks, the more agreeable it will be to human beings – but only up to a point. When the automaton approaches the point at which it can be mistaken for an actual human being, the non-human aspects (lack of human expression, intonation, body language, etc) unconsciously create feelings of unease. This effect is also said to describe the sense of discomfort reported by audiences of CGI films such as Robert ZemeckisThe Polar Express (2004), Beowulf (2007) and A Christmas Carol (2009). Robophobia manifests itself in several ways in this story: at different extremes it induces Poul into a catatonic state; for Taren Capel, brought up by robots, it leads to over-identification by a process of what a Freudian would no doubt call ‘reaction formation‘ and cognitive psychologists would attribute to cognitive dissonance.

”The Robots of Death” came towards the end of the three-year run of producer Philip Hinchcliffe, and it was script-edited by the great Robert Holmes. This period had been marked by a degree of Gothic excess unprecedented in a TV show largely aimed at children; the most fondly remembered stories of this period (”Pyramids of Mars”, ”The Brain of Morbius”, ”The Seeds of Doom”, ”The Deadly Assassin” and ”The Talons of Weng-Chiang”) are also amongst the most traumatic things ever broadcast before the watershed. Most of these stories were built around the Gothic theme of the ‘uncanny‘: the familiar made strange. ”Robots of Death” was very much part of this phase; it was also, however, explicitly political in its use of the uncanny to comment directly on colonialism, class, and exploitation, in a way the show had not been since the early Seventies. The story combines a specifically science fictional variation of the uncanny as a metaphor for alienation while retaining the signature Gothic horror codes of the Hinchcliffe-Holmes era.

Boucher wrote three stories for Doctor Who, the others being ”The Face of Evil” (1977), which immediately preceded ”The Robots of Death” and introduced the companion Leela, and the Quatermass and the Pit-inspired ”Image of the Fendahl”. He was script-editor of all four seasons of Blake’s 7 (also writing the episodes ”Shadow”, ”Weapon”, ”Trial”, ”Star One”, ”City at the Edge of the World”, ”Rumours of Death”, ”Death-Watch”, ”Rescue” and the notorious series finale ”Blake”) and on the detective series ShoestringandBergerac; he would later combine the science fiction and detective genres to create the short-livedStar Cops in 1987. In 1998 he returned to the worlds of Doctor Who with the spin-off novel Last Man Running; this was followed by Corpse Marker (a direct sequel to ”The Robots of Death”, 1999), Psi-ence Fiction(2001) and Match of the Day (2005).

Unusual for aDoctor Whowriter, Boucher displays a knowledge of science fiction literature: ”The Face of Evil”, for instance, had distinct echoes of Harry Harrison‘s Captive Universe (1969) in its portrayal of a civilization which has fractured into two groups, a tribe of Bronze Aged savages and another which retains traces of scientific knowledge coded as religious ritual. ”The Robots of Death” borrows liberally from several key science fiction texts, notably E.M. Forster‘s The Machine Stops (1909), Karel Čapek‘s R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) (1920) and several stories from Isaac Asimov‘s Robot series, in particular his novel The Naked Sun (1957). Forster’s short story features a machine-dependent society on the brink of collapse while Čapek’s play describes a robot rebellion (in fact, Čapek’s play is the origin of the word ‘robot’). The name Taren Capel is likely to have been derived from that of Karel Čapek. The Naked Sun features a similar robot-dependant society faced with the possibility that their servants may turn against them, and a protagonist who is mildly robophobic. The Sandminer is, of course, borrowed from Frank Herbert‘s Dune (1965). These intertextual threads are woven deftly together by Boucher to create a coherent sense of a fictional world in which we can believe his characters live and work, helped on TV, I should add, by some terrific art deco production design; although they were not used in the Premier performance of the play the group have recreated the beautiful robot masks used by the BBC.

Paul Darrow was magnificent in his one-off performance, a snarling Clint Eastwood just the right side of camp (depending, of course, which side of camp you regard as the ‘right’ one!). His delivery of the Doctor’s withering put-down ”You are the perfect example of the inverse relationship between the size of the mouth and the size of the brain” will stay with me a long time. The cast had been slightly rejigged for this premiere performance in order to accommodate the star so it will be interesting to see how the production changes when it returns later this month. The cast are excellent, snd you may recognize several from the Lass O’Gowrie‘s adaptation of Alan Moore‘s The Ballad of Halo Jones (look out for Dan Thackeray’s Together in Electric Dreams, by the way). and the producers have gone the revamped Battlestar Galactica route of freshening the story up by altering the sex of some of the characters. ”The Robots of Death” had been unusual for the Hinchcliffe-Holmes era in having decent roles for women other than the Doctor’s companion, and changes here, while making little difference to the pot, nonetheless open the story up to a feminist interpretation.

The play, however, is not a total success, and where it falls is largely where it deviates from Boucher’s original concept. On TV the Doctor had to investigate the mystery, then improvise an ingenious solution when Taren Capel was revealed. Here, Iago and Bleyes are aware of Capel’s presence from the start, and the story concludes in an unsubtle hail of plasma bullets. Worse, the last few minutes unveil another, previously unhinted-at force behind the events; it’s the equivalent of Hercule Poirot gathering all the suspects together in the library, only to reveal the killer is from an entirely unrelated Miss Marple story before spraying the room with a machine gun. The play itself has been made strange.

Blayes comes to the fore in this story as awakes 18 months later on another Sandminer, uncertain how she got there; Iago is now reduced to a disembodied voice in her head. The story involves constantly shifting realities, with a much more sketchily defined background, and supporting characters lacking any sense of motivation, or indeed, reality. Whether the story is set entirely inside Blayes’ dying brain or inside the alien gestalt or somewhere else entirely is open to interpretation. The story involves several Buddhist themes derived from the teaching of Zen Master Linji Yixuan, founder of the Rinzai school:

Followers of the Way, if you want to get the kind of understanding that accords with the Dharma, never be misled by others. Whether you’re facing inward or facing outward, whatever you meet up with, just kill it! If you meet a buddha, kill the buddha. If you meet a patriarch, kill the patriarch. If you meet an arhat, kill the arhat. If you meet your parents, kill your parents. If you meet your kinfolk, kill your kinfolk. Then for the first time you will gain emancipation, will not be entangled with things, will pass freely anywhere you wish to go.

When you set out upon a journey, kill everyone you happen upon: kill your friends and your parents and your children, should you meet them on the road. Kill the topmasters, the firstmasters, and the holy men; only that way can you become free. Only when you have killed everyone will you become truly enlightened.

The difference is that Linji was speaking metaphorically, and did not carry a plasma pistol.

”There is me, [Alex], and my three Grrrlz, Petra, Georgia, and Mid, Mid being really mid, which sometimes makes me mad, though I know tisn’t really her fault, [Poor Cow!]”

– Belinda Webb, A Clockwork Apple

A Clockwork Apple (2008) by first-time novelist Belinda Webb is, as both the title and the opening paragraph suggest, a pastiche of by Anthony Burgess‘ A Clockwork Orange (1962).

The novel parallels Burgess’ original quite closely

As with Burgess’ novel the story is told in an invented teen argot

”What I did is no different from disaffected groups creating and using their own words – showing an instinctive awareness of trying to create a means of power via a shared private language. Yet it is only powerful and creative if channelled in the right way, and when its rightful place within our political discourse is recognised. The gap between ‘bringing out’ and ‘keeping in’ must be recognised.”

Okrent takes us through the history of constructed languages from Hildegard von Bingen (Saint Hildegard, or Sibyl of the Rhine), a 12th Century Garman nun, composer and polymath, who gave us the first documented invented language, the purpose of which is long forgotten, to the 17th Century English Clergyman John Wilkins, who’s 600 page opus An Essay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language (1668) attempts to categorise no less than everything in the universe according to a branching hierarchical scheme.